A number of services exist for sending e-mail messages through an Internet, web, or HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) interface. Such services are typically resident on a server connected to the Internet, and thus provide a convenient means for allowing users to communicate because they typically require no special software or minimal software to be present on the users' computer.
Typical e-mail interfaces allow users to compose text messages and to correct spelling or other errors in the text message. Hotmail™ and Yahoo™ are two popular web-based e-mail interfaces, and each provides a spell checking feature. Yahoo's spell checking interface is shown in FIGS. 1A-1B, and a flow chart of the spell checking process it employs is shown in FIG. 2. The spell check interface 10 has a text box 20 that contains the text of the message composed by the user. During spell checking, the text box 20 highlights the first error 22 present in the text, in this example the misspelled word “spel.” This first error 22 is highlighted by displaying it in a red color (shown in bold for simplicity in FIG. 1A), and is accompanied by a correction control box 30 that allows the user to fix the error 22. The correction control box 30 includes typical options to allow the user to fix the error, including a correction text box where the user can re-type the misspelled word, a list of suggested spellings 34, and other interface buttons 36 which generally allow the user to make a change to or ignore a particular error. Other typical interface buttons 12 allow the e-mail to be processed (e.g., sent, stored, edited, etc.) as is well known.
When the user addresses (e.g., fixes) the first error 22, the spell check interface 10 continues checking the text in box 20 for the next error 24, as shown in FIG. 1B, in this example the misspelled word “mesage.” This second error 24 is highlighted in similar fashion, and again allows the user to address this error using the correction control box 30. This process then similarly continues to allow the user to sequentially correct the next errors in the text (e.g., “multipal,” “erors,” etc.) (not shown), and when the entirety of the text is edited, permits the user to send the message to intended recipients.
A flow chart 40 illustrating this spelling error identification/correction process is shown in FIG. 2. The user first enters text using a text messaging interface (Step 41), and then elects to spell check the text, which may occur automatically when the message is sent for example. Engaging the spell checking feature causes the text of the message to be sent to a spell checking routine on a server (Step 42). The spell checking routine identifies and tags all errors in the message and formats an interpreted correction file of the text message which is sent back to the user (Step 43). The user then uses the spell check interface 10 as described above to make corrections to the errors identified in the text. If the spell check interface 10 determines that there are errors in the text message (Step 44), the spell check interface 10 highlights the error in the text message and shows suggestions and options for correcting the error (Step 46) as noted earlier, with such suggestions coming from the script of the interpreted correction file. After the user makes a correction to the error (Step 46), the spell check interface 10 returns to Step 44 to allow the next error (if any) to be displayed and corrected.
Hotmail's spell check interface is similar to Yahoo's, as is its process for correcting errors. However, one difference between the two is Yahoo's method of interacting with the server. As noted above, Yahoo sends the message once to the server, at which time an interpreted correction file is compiled and consulted numerous times to serially correct each error in the message. By contrast, Hotmail submits each correction to the server. After fixing a first error, the user's page is refreshed to show the next misspelled word. Thus, the Hotmail spell checker requires as many accesses to the Hotmail server as there are misspelled words in the message. Otherwise, both Yahoo and Hotmail work similarly from the user's perspective, as each allows each error in the message to be highlighted and corrected sequentially.
But these approaches have drawbacks. Specifically, by serially presenting each error in the message to the user, the user has no idea when error checking is engaged of the magnitude of the errors present in the message, e.g., whether one, ten, or more errors are present. Moreover, as the user cannot view all errors simultaneously, the user has no flexibility to correct errors in the order of his choosing (e.g., fourth error first, first error second, etc). This means that the user must instead patiently proceed through each sequential error to know what errors are present, even if in retrospect some errors are uninteresting to the user or are not truly errors. In short, user flexibility, in terms of being able to make a global assessment of all the errors in the message in parallel, is hampered. Moreover, the correction control box 30 typically used in spelling checking interfaces such as Yahoo and Hotmail disrupts visualization of the user's original text message as this box and all of its appurtenant buttons must be displayed somewhere on the screen.
The subject matter of the present disclosure is directed to overcoming, or at least reducing the shortfalls or effects of, one or more of the problems set forth above.